Unsafe Rust
Talkat RustConf 2026 · on Wednesday, 2026-09-09· at 14:50· Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal, Palais des Congrès de Montréal·
summary
Rust reduces many memory-safety bugs but no formal memory model exists so undefined behavior invalidates all program guarantees; evidence: 10% of Rust kernel code is unsafe and foundational abstractions can be 30–50% unsafe; Rust Edition 2024 forces unsafe on many attributes (extern, no_mangle, link_section); practical issues include pointer provenance, uninitialized reads via assume_init, function-pointer identity, memory leaks and stack overflow; tools cited: Miri and Clippy; unsafe remains necessary for system programming and unsettled for safety assurance.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction and speaker background
- 1:09Functional safety in automotive systems
- 5:05Rust memory model and safety guarantees
- 8:22Limitations of Rust memory safety
- 12:21Undefined behavior in Rust
- 17:44Language vs library undefined behavior
- 22:04Rust's unsettled and experimental nature
- 28:47System programming and unsafe Rust
- 34:07Pointer provenance in Rust
- 37:45Unsafe requirements in Rust 2024
- 39:10Rust memory model specifics
- 41:37Summary and conclusion
